Key management in a device-server environment is important for a variety of reasons. One such reason is using a key to establish a secure or more trusted communications link.
One older key distribution approach is Kerboros. In Kerboros, there is a server, referred to as the Authentication server, dedicated to authenticating users or clients for other servers on the network. Kerboros is based on DES, a symmetric encryption algorithm, for key distribution. In Kerboros, the Authentication server is the central server that performs all the cryptographic authentication of clients. Performing all cryptographic authentication on a single or small number of Authentication servers may present problems for device-server configurations having many devices.